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THE
Transformers
(opening in Philippine theaters days ahead of its July 3
opening in
North America—Ed.) concept is simple: In the blink of an eye, some
innocuous thing—a car, for instance—morphs into an
alien-whupping killing machine.
Director
Michael Bay has undergone his own transformation, and
while it’s hardly as dramatic as what happens in his new
movie, his turnabout does suggest that he is about to
have a much sunnier summer than his last time around.
When Bay
was previously putting the finishing touches on a summer
movie, he wasn’t having that grand a time. The year was
2005 and the movie was The
Island. Bay was
battling with DreamWorks over the movie’s advertising
campaign, but the ads were only a part of the problem.
Moviegoers didn’t seem to know what the movie’s title
meant (there’s no island in The Island) and the
$125-million antiutopian drama was opening on the heels
of three box-office hits: Wedding Crashers,
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Fantastic
Four.
On the set
Michael Bay preps
a scene on the set of Transformers, based
on the
enduringly popular Hasbro’s toy line and eagerly awaited
by young and old fans.
The
Island was routed. It sold just $35.8 million worth of
tickets in its entire domestic release, and while the
movie performed better overseas—grossing more than $124
million—it was Bay’s first flop. After an uninterrupted
run of solid and whopper hits (Bad Boys, The
Rock, Armageddon, Pearl Harbor, Bad
Boys II), Bay’s winning streak was in tatters.
Still,
he went back to work three weeks after The Island
opened and closed. Rather than make a smaller, more
personal movie as he has long talked about, he jumped
into another huge and challenging summer movie, with two
of the same screenwriters—Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci—who
penned The Island, and he was returning to
DreamWorks, the same studio behind The Island
(and which is now owned by Paramount Pictures).
Bay
didn’t have a screenplay or a cast, but a July 4, 2007,
release date had already been set and it was looming. He
wasn’t all that familiar with Hasbro’s Transformers
toys. And he knew he’d be following massive sequels to
Pirates of the Caribbean, Spider-Man and
Shrek.
But Bay
believed he could make a Transformers movie work. “I
just thought,” he said, “it could be something new and
different that I could do well.”
It was a
certainty he didn’t always feel.
Serious? Funny? Both?
“WHY
should I do this movie?” Bay found himself asking, not
once or even twice. He asked it repeatedly, both of
himself and his collaborators: Kurtzman and Orci, and
producers Steven Spielberg (who came up with the idea to
make the film) and Lorenzo di Bonaventura.
“My
friends would say, ‘Why are you doing that movie? Is it
animation? Is it a cartoon?’ They didn’t get it,” Bay
said. (The toy line previously anchored a 1984 animated
TV series and a 1986 animated movie.) But the more time
Bay spent with the toys—he even attended Hasbro’s
Transformers school—the more the movie’s themes
coalesced.
Bay,
with a sometimes feared reputation for being demanding,
always envisioned Transformers not as a toy movie but as
a live-action spectacle loaded with visual effects. Yet
he wasn’t as certain about the film’s narrative and
emotional hook. “Our take on it was it’s about a kid
finding his adulthood through his first car,” Kurtzman
said.
That kid
is Sam Witwicky (Shia LaBeouf) and the car his dad
(Kevin Dunn) buys him is a 1977 Camaro. Like many
machines in the film, the car leads a double life. When
an alien Transformer attacks a US military base in
Qatar, an intergalactic war between the good Autobots
and not-so-nice Decepticons is launched. Before long,
Witwicky and what his car turns into are drawn into an
epic battle.
The
robots are, of course, fantastic, but the warfare is
very real; the US government supplied planes and
assistance to the production. “If you are fighting alien
robots, you need the American military helping out,” Bay
says.
Di
Bonaventura says even with that straightforward story
line, Bay faced another challenge. Was Transformers
going to be serious? Funny? Or both? “The hardest thing
to do with a franchise is to find the tone,” he says. As
a rough cut showed, the film alternates between PG-13
action and old-fashioned, Americana humor more
reminiscent of a Spielberg movie.
From the
beginning, the producer says, Bay had strong ideas and
wasn’t any less opinionated because of The
Island’s performance. “You don’t want filmmakers
second-guessing each decision they make,” Di Bonaventura
says. “I think people will be surprised by the movie.
There is a spectacular amount of heart and humor in it.”
The
studio likes what it has seen and is already developing
a Transformers sequel script.
Through
it all, obsessed fans watched the production closely.
Bay says someone even hacked into his home computer to
try to steal the Transformers script. While the director
did share some production details with enthusiasts, he
also used his blog (www.michaelbay.com/blog/newsblog.html)
to snipe at some Web critics. “This is by far the most
action I have ever put into a movie — I have 12 huge set
pieces,” he wrote in one posting. “Boy, I get tired of
these lame crybabies on the Net.”
A
different mood
STILL,
Bay’s mood working on Transformers was measurably
brighter than it had been just before the release of
The Island in 2005. With the opening just a few
weeks away, the director knew that film was in trouble.
As he finished an Island color-timing session with an
editor, Bay seemed exhausted, eager for the whole
experience to be over.
In the
back of his mind he knew the film wasn’t going to be a
blockbuster, but he still hoped it might somehow crawl
past $100 million in domestic theaters. A conference
room at Bay’s Santa Monica offices was filled with
Transformer toys, those robotic-looking action figures
that can twist and turn into new configurations—cars,
rockets, weapons—but back in 2005, they were hardly his
priority.
Two
years later, the mood at his offices was much more
upbeat. Sure, Bay was a little worried that the most
recent horror movie made under his Platinum Dunes genre
label, The Hitcher, had sold a fraction of the
tickets sold by the label’s earlier remakes, The
Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Amityville Horror
(“We’re trying to figure out where that business is
going”). Yet production was picking up at Digital
Domain, the special-effects house Bay and investment
firm Wyndcrest Holdings purchased a year ago.
Bay had
some work left to do on the $145-million Transformers
and was awaiting the completion of several
special-effects shots. The studio wanted him to cut the
film’s running time by a few minutes and Bay wanted to
tweak its ending, but most of the hard labor was behind
him. He had just screened 28 minutes of it to an
enthusiastic audience of theater owners in Las Vegas. In
a few days, he would travel to Phoenix for another test
screening, where the film scored even better than
Armageddon.
The
director says he spent no time at all ruminating over
any possible lessons The Island could have taught
him. “You know, I think the movie works,” he said. “But
I never thought it was going to be a smash. On
Armageddon, I had a feeling—a gut feeling—that there
was something big.”
His
enthusiasm for Transformers is more tempered. Bay
realizes his latest film is no easy sell, particularly
since it’s one of the few nonsequels to hit the screen
this season.
“We are
still the underdogs,” Bay says. “Big time.” |
